Events

Artist Demo with Annie Silverman: The Story So Far – Improvisational Woodcut and Multi-Layered Printmaking

In-Person Event: Masks Required

October 12, 2022

10:30am-12:00pm

Improvisational woodcut? Like jazz, but with sharp tools—this is how Annie Silverman describes her classes at Abrazos Press in Somerville.

The layered print? As the poet Stanley Kunitz said, “Live in the layers, not in the litter.” These are techniques that Annie has developed over twenty years of teaching non-traditional relief printmaking techniques.

As a self-taught printmaker with a background in fibers, she has developed ways to work in printmaking that are additive, collage-like, and continually surprising. Annie will show carved woodblocks and prints in both dimensional and flat formats, and she will do a demonstration in waxing prints on Japanese paper with beeswax to create translucent surfaces that can be used in many ways such as book pages and sewn sculptures.

Annie Silverman is the proprietor of Abrazos Press, a teaching and professional printmaking studio in Somerville, MA. Her prints and Artist books have been collected and exhibited nationally and internationally and are in the collections of the Boston Athenaeum, The Boston Public Library and The De Cordova Museum.

In June 2022 her prints were exhibited at the Venice Biennale as part of the LA printmakers collaborative project: The Paper Boat Flotilla. Double-sided prints on the theme of water were created on Japanese paper and folded into origami boats. Annie enjoys the experimental aspects of mostly relief printmaking and has created installations, dimensional prints, and Artists Books with her work. Since 2018 she has been working on an index of her carved woodblocks, which will be published this fall. The pandemic turned twenty years of woodblock prints into twenty-two years!

Abrazos means embraces, or hugs, in Spanish. The studio reflects this welcoming atmosphere, engaging both student and the public in appreciation of printmaking in its many different forms.